In the current information age, it has often been discussed that proliferation of information technology (IT) can lead to more convenience, efficiency, productivity, enjoyment, etc., in life. The extensive use and development of IT tools for managing data or information in, for example, an enterprise (or other organization) environment, is exemplified by use, in many instances, of a variety of heterogeneous software applications in a workflow.
In such typical heterogeneous environment, the data, documents and files generated by one software application in many instances are not readily accessible and/or usable by another application.
Metadata is commonly used in an IT system where the data is the content of computer files, to facilitate the understanding, characteristics, and management of the data (that is, computer files), and for example, includes name of the file, type of the file, name and length of individual data items, name of the author or administrator of the data or file, etc. Some examples of use of metadata in an IT environment are described in commonly-owned application Ser. No. 12/112,709, entitled “MANAGING ELECTRONIC DATA WITH INDEX DATA CORRESPONDING TO SAID ELECTRONIC DATA”, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Thus, metadata can be efficaciously used to manage data. However, conventional systems typically do not allow shared use of metadata across heterogeneous systems. Thus, even if an application system can convert the document or file generated by another application system, the former application system generally does not make efficient (if any) use of the metadata generated by the latter system.